Holy ow!

This article in The Vancouver Sun just floored me, and goes back to my comment on the Is it okay to be fat? thread. Exactly how much pain and suffering is society at large expecting us to have to endure to fit their narrow body ideals? If we're not being asked to run four miles and eat a scant 1300 calories per day a la Meme Roth, then someone is coming up with a procedure where a polyethylene patch is sewn onto a fat person's tongue to make it excruciating for him or her to eat solid food. Really? Is this something we need to do to people? Isn't the fact that any fat person is willing to undergo this type of procedure enough to prove that as a society we have kind of gone off the rails when it comes to body size?

Interesting how the Vancouver Sun article has a headless fattie picture, compared to the Winnipeg Free Press version I'd mentioned in the forum having a photo of the actual proceedure. Exactly the same article, yet the photos would inspire different initial reactions from potential readers.

This is a horrifying article. Sewing a patch on someone's tongue so that they cannot eat solid food is as one doctor quoted "medieval torture." However, we see these techniques come and go in a fat-hating society. Who remembers stories of people having their jaws wired shut so that they could only consume liquids? To cap it off, the inventor of the tongue patch responds: "There is nothing barbaric about it . . . It's a very gentle, non-invasive procedure."